When Killers Become Victims

8/18/2019 When Killers Become Victims

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1/21/08 2:oading “Impression”

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When kil lers become victims: anti-semitism and itscritics

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G I L A N I D J A R

Gil Anidjar is Associate Professor in the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages andCultures at Columbia University. His most recent book is entitled Semites: Race, Religion,Literature (Stanford University Press, 2007).

Résumé / Abstract

La lutte contre l’antisémitisme est désormais un phénomène global. Elle s’inscrit - elle est menée -dans de nouvelles législations et de nouvelles politiques nationales et internationales, dans laculture populaire américaine (Hollywood) ou dans la vie intellectuelle française, dans des effetsstatistiques et des inquiétudes sociologiques de proportions planétaires. Il s’agira ici decomprendre ce phénomène fragmenté comme un mouvement de masse qui demande à êtreinterprété en tant que tel. Que faisons-nous, qui sommes-nous, nous qui combattonsl’antisémitisme à l’échelle planétaire ? En tant que nous ne sommes pas organisés mais divisés,

en tant que nous ne nous connaissons pas nous mêmes, en tant que la tradition dans laquellenous nous plaçons - y-a-t-il une tradition anti-antisémite ? - nous est inconnue ou inaccessible,nous restons ignorants de nos succès et de nos échecs, ainsi que du rôle que nous jouons (ounon) sur la scène mondiale. Telles sont les questions qui motivent la réflexion engagée ici. Ils’agira de tracer quelques lignes qui permettront de commencer à comprendre la lutte contrel’antisémitisme telle que, consciemment ou non, nous la menons : mouvement transnational,comme aurait dit Hannah Arendt ou effet de masse et pouvoir, après Elias Canetti.

—I’m a recovering anti-Semite. I was saved by A-S.A.—A-S.A.?—Anti-Semites Anonymous.—Philip Roth, Operation Shylock

It is undoubtedly the case that anti-Semitism, along with other forms of racism, must be combated.It must also be documented. Having painstakingly engaged in such a precise, documentingendeavor with regards to the devastation imagined and unleashed by Western racism in its literary,technological, and legal dimensions, Sven Lindqvist confessed to having pursued an additional goalas well. What he wanted to do, in The Skull Measurer’s Mistake, was to remind readers that the

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struggle was altogether older, if not time-honored. He wanted to show that there were also thosewho had long opposed and fought racism, those “who today are often forgotten, and as far as Iknow have never been discussed together.” Lindqvist had hoped “to show those who are todayfighting against racism something of the long and proud tradition to which they belong.”1 It isprecisely with regard to such tradition – whether known or unknown – that a renewed, comparativereflection has now become necessary with regards to the history of the struggle against racismand, more generally, the history of resistance and liberation movements, groups and organizationswho oppose discrimination and oppression in one or all of its forms, which may gain by beingdiscussed together. Indeed, even a cursory look at this history should reveal the exceptional placeoccupied in it by the current battles waged against anti-Semitism. Most historical struggles andmovements, Lindqvist suggests, belong to and partake of long traditions, precisely: intellectual andscientific, social and political, and even theological traditions. In order to establish or increase itsreach and legitimacy, each of them inscribes itself in an often contested (oft forgotten, sometimeseven fictitious) but always weighty and venerable lineage, rich with antecedents and precedents.The abolitionist movement, for example, elaborated its complex ties to the biblical account of Exodus and to Christian doctrine; and the earlier arguments, however ineffective, that wereinaugurated by Bartolome de Las Casas or Thomas Morton against the persecution of Amerindiansare still alive and remembered;2 consider as well the force of anti-colonialism (the appeal touniversalism of Toussaint l’Ouverture) and the consistent, if also rare and problematic, opposition to“the scandal of Empire;” 3 recall the nineteenth century struggle against sexual inequality and later against misogyny and sexual discrimination;4 think of Montaigne and later of Herder, who

articulated some of the most essential arguments still necessary to refute a form of racism that,paradoxically, had yet to emerge in its full-blown, modern incarnation; 5 think finally of theprotection of the environment and of its religious roots (real and imagined), and of “radical anti-Zionism” such as was elaborated within Jewish orthodox consciousness.6 What is remarkable isthat nothing of the sort can be said about the current struggle against anti-Semitism, which neither invokes nor claims traditional roots or historical antecedents. One what basis, then, do weunderstand this struggle? Do we understand it? And can we – should we – isolate, among allstruggles and movements, the struggle against anti-Semitism? Why distinguish it from the anti-racist struggle? Do we even agree that there is one such struggle? That it is one at all? What arethe signs pointing in its direction? And if there are such signs – older or newer – of the struggle’sexistence, have they been discussed together? What would thereby be gained?

Lindqvist continues to be instructive, who acknowledges, while markedly distinguishing, thespecificity of each of the collectives targeted and defended and the traditions of responses toprejudice and attack.7 The following essay is premised on a similar acknowledgment. Morespecifically, the apparent absence of tradition notwithstanding, it is easy to grant that anti-Semitismcan be – and more importantly, has been – isolated and singled out, raised up in its singularity. Ithas become a target unto itself, distinguished in numerous sites and manners from other forms of racisms. Moreover, there are today massive signs, and indeed, efforts, that make it impossible toignore the relative integrity (not necessarily the coherence, much less the concerted and unifiedintent, perhaps, but a relative integrity nonetheless) of a phenomenon I will be referring to, after thewar on drugs, the war on poverty and the war on terror, as “the war on anti-Semitism” (hereafter,WAS). These targeted efforts have been deployed by states and governments, internationalinstitutions, the mass media in all its forms, various organizations and public intellectuals, allmobilized to fight anti-Semitism in particular, and increasingly so in recent years. They are

impressionistically and globally manifested in the enduring, international concerns (andconsiderable media barrage) over “the new anti-Semitism” in Europe and in the US, and in theslew of responses to it. A random and non-exhaustive sample should suffice to illustrate the extentof this struggle for now: from an Anti-Defamation League campaign in New York City to a range of reactions to Hollywood movies, and the number of subsequent New York Times editorialsdedicated to the issue; from groups like “Campus Watch” and accusations of anti-Semitism atColumbia University and elsewhere to the numerous pieces of legislations passed by the U.S.Congress as well as by many European parliaments; from the scholarly institutes established andexpanded to study anti-Semitism to international conferences on the topic conducted by scholarsand policy makers (in Europe, the U.S., Australia, and so forth); from Harvard President Lawrence


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Summer’s statements (raising the specter of speech and acts that would be “anti-Semitism in effectif not in intent”) with rejoinders by intellectuals and writers, all of whom are participating in renewedreflections on and responses to anti-Semitism.8 But the list is longer (I return to it in more detailsbelow) and there seems to be more than sufficient ground, therefore, to take stock and consider these public acts and gestures as parts of a wide, indeed, massive mobilization to combat anti-Semitism. As mobilizations go, it appears to be a successful one. It seems to me obvious, at anyrate, that there is, if not a concerted effort and struggle, at least a multiple and layered deploymentof diverse means and interventions, united or not, minimally tactical if not always strategic, all of which gather in pursuit of the same purpose, namely, to wage a fight against anti-Semitism. Thereis, there appears to be, a war against anti-Semitism. It is this visible manifestation (with or withoutadditional depth, with or without constituency, with or without unity) that warrants the reflections Iwish to offer here.

Now, as I have said, in this multifarious struggle, no tradition, no antecedents, appear to be active,none simply found – not even an “invented” or an “imagined” tradition (in another lexicon, onemight consider that there is no appeal to the universal on the parts of the victims, only a claim tothe universal dimension of the prejudice). Certainly, no tradition or antecedents are invoked in thestill unsurpassed interventions of Horkheimer and Adorno, Sartre and, last but not least, Arendt.These early representatives of the struggle against anti-Semitism are conspicuously discreet abouttheir forerunners, if there were any. Arendt does retrieve from oblivion the idiosyncratic figure of Bernard Lazare;9 Horkheimer and Adorno rely on Freud (though not on his explicit attempt to

participate in WAS, namely, Moses and Monotheism); and whereas Fanon could complain aboutthe inadequacy of his predecessors (Maran, Mannoni) in the struggle against racism andcolonialism, Sartre – who inspired Fanon before writing a preface for The Wretched of the Earth –makes no similar gesture in his famed attack on “the anti-Semite.” Clearly, voices had been raisedbefore in defense of the Jews, alliances had been formed to protect them and vindicate their cause, their very existence. After all, had not the Church itself produced arguments against themassacre of Jews?

In order to give ourselves the means to understand and interpret what WAS is and the place itoccupies today, in order to rate its success and take the measure of its effects – the admittedlyambitious goal of this essay – it is essential to recognize that, although the two moments may berelated, the fight against a particular form of oppression or persecution is not always accompaniedby concerns on behalf (much less in favor) of its victims. To argue and fight against slavery, for

instance, does not require that one take a position on the needs and rights of slaves (hence whitesupremacists could wish for the abolition of slavery but do so only in order to send blacks to Africaand “cleanse” the United States of their presence). Inversely, to uphold the cause of women’srights, as Mary Wollstonecraft and others did, does not explicitly or necessarily convey a critique of its perpetrators and enforcers, of male-dominated power or even misogynists. Today, one may alsoconsider reigning attitudes toward the targets of the current – if also older – tendency to malign or pathologize Islam (and to deny the rise, nay, the very existence, of Islamophobia), an issue towhich we shall return and one with all too obvious, and all too ignored, connections with thesubject matter of this essay. And consider how long it took for “the principle of race equality [to]become an accepted part of Western political culture and [to be] endorsed as a fundamentalprinciple of international affairs.”10 Finally, and by way of a closing illustration, if “there is a strongsense in which the members of the ‘School of Salamanca’ and their heirs were, as the settlers in America dimly perceived them to be, anti-imperialists,” it is also the case that they were not so

“because of their horror at the human suffering which the Spanish colonizers had inflicted upon thecolonized – although that horror was real enough – but because of the threat which, in their view,all extended empires posed to what they conceived to be the true nature of the civil community.”11

There may exist, therefore, a philo-Semitic tradition, as well as a Jewish and non-Jewish apologetictradition in praise of the Jews and of Judaism, but these do not amount to a reserve of argumentative and political weapons available to WAS, 12 nor do such historical armament seem tofigure in it, in fact. Inversely, WAS, were it to have older roots (or a longer history), would notinevitably testify to a positive attitude toward Jews. Clearly, anti-Semitism has always been, as Arendt put it, “an outrage to common sense,” but this has not meant (nor should it necessarily

anti-Semitic


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mean) that Jews would be considered passive and innocent, universally blameless or inherentlyworthy of adulation. To understand anti-Semitism one should no doubt have some understandingof the Jewish condition (or rather, the Jewish conditions), much as one will surely gain fromconsidering the hatred of the Jews and its different historical forms in order to study Jewish history.Yet, as Sartre well understood, anti-Semitism (and, by extension, the struggle against it) constitutesa phenomenon that, comparable to racism, slavery or colonialism (and the opposition they elicit),warrants that the lens of inquiry be turned primarily upon its subjects and agents – not its targets.We must acknowledge therefore the absence of a tradition of struggle against anti-Semitism andconfront the novelty of its recent appearance, and we must do so according to the terms and

grammar it has deployed.

Such a perspectival turn, by now somewhat banal, has little to do with the harm that oppressionand persecution are said to bring upon their perpetrators. It is undoubtedly the case that “theoccupation hurts all of us” (as the Israeli left has it), or that racism and colonialism frequentlyindicate, or at least result in, ethical and cultural decay and corruption among those who practice it. And this is certainly true for anti-Semitism as well. Such social and ideological phenomena mighttherefore be opposed (as they in fact should ), though not necessarily, nor primarily, for these self-oriented (or outright self-serving) reasons. But granted that there might be these as well as other reasons, must they be articulated – or worse, interrogated – for fighting that which is so clearlyblameworthy? Is it not the case that evil should be fought wherever it shows its protean face? Inthe particular case of anti-Semitism, lines of argument such as these have, I think, activelycontributed to a naturalization of the struggle, making anti-Semitism all too obvious and necessary,indeed, “natural,” a target. True, anti-Semitism should be implacably resisted and fought. But howhas it come to be so? At what price? With what consequences, or (hidden) benefits? And towhom? Out of what sources and resources? And whence, finally, its resilience?

The Holocaust is obviously of great significance here but one should recall that WAS has not beenan immediate, much less a “natural” response to this event.13 Minimally, the delay in thecoagulation and institutionalization of memory practices, the hesitations and debates as to proper pedagogical consequences and their variety, the wide and singular array of legislation enacted andits numerous temporalities, would suffice to de-naturalize the Holocaust and mark it as insufficient acause for anything but mechanical psychic and political responses. Moreover, and to my mindmore significantly, the manifest absence of a tradition going back to earlier times and activelyengaged in contesting and opposing anti-Semitism, as well as the nature of the current WAS, must

be explained and historicized by way of additional events and dynamics. WAS must thus bereflected upon and treated as a relatively autonomous phenomenon, even if one to besubsequently reframed and recontextualized. Otherwise put, WAS must be interpreted andunderstood at once in its own right and from within a larger interpretive frame (that includes but isnot exhausted by the Holocaust). Minimally, it could only gain from engaging in the kind of self-reflexive interrogation that is necessary for its advancement.

But has anti-Semitism been understood? Can we already claim, after decades of intensivestudying, learning, thinking, legislating on and combating anti-Semitism that it is now better or evensufficiently known? More importantly, has anti-Semitism been refuted ? The current case againstIslam – under the guise of a “critique” of (a) religion that, only yesterday, was consideredparadigmatic among “the religions of the Semites” – should give us pause, and might well be keptin mind throughout what follows. For now, recall that Hannah Arendt had already remarked that, in

the decades after the Dreyfus affair, and in spite of its apparent, if protracted, results, in spite of the intellectual achievements and prestige of the Dreyfusards, it long remained the situation inFrance that “anti-Semitism in general had never fallen into the same social and intellectualdisrepute as in other European countries.”14 In a similar, if more ironic and even cynical, spirit,Horkheimer and Adorno argue (in 1944!) that “there are no more anti-Semites,” albeit because“anti-Semitic psychology has been replaced by mere acceptance of the whole Fascist ticket, theslogans of aggressive big business.” For them, “anti -Semitism has virtually ceased to be anindependent impulse and is now a plank in the platform . . . The conviction of the anti-Semites –however artificial it may be – has been absorbed in the predetermined and subjectless reflexes of a political party.”15 Anti-Semitism – an unworthy, vanishing opponent? Closer to us, Jean-François


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Lyotard raises at least the specter of an uneasy “victory” over it when he writes that the destructionof Nazism also leaves a silence after it: one does not dare think out Nazism because it has beenbeaten down like a mad dog, by a police action, and not in conformity with the rules accepted byits adversaries’ genres of discourse (argumentation for liberalism, contradiction for Marxism). It hasnot been refuted.16

In 1944, Horkheimer and Adorno could hardly think that anti-Semitism had actually vanished, butthey felt confident that it would (“the fact that anti-Semitism tends to occur only as part of an

interchangeable program is sure hope that it will die out one day”).

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By the 1980s, Jean-FrançoisLyotard takes stock of that vector of change – emphatically not a refutation – and he is not socertain. The French philosopher is clearly not regretting the beating in question, nor is henecessarily affirming the need to engage Nazism in conversation. He is moreover unlikely to becommenting here on the political dimension of Nazism, on the Nazi regime as a mode of government and on its status after World War II. Furthermore, the subsequent end of anti-Fascismas a social and political movement (its becoming equated with the all but discredited, and at anyrate vanished, Communist bloc) would suffice to indicate – rightly or wrongly – that the refutationhere evoked is no longer needed.18 But be that as it may, Lyotard’s recurring concerns regardingthe persecution and the “forgetting” of the Jews, as well as the enduring battles currently wagedagainst anti-Semitism, more forcefully and equally ominously suggest that it is, in fact, the“elements of anti-Semitism” (in Horkheimer and Adorno’s phrase) that have survived and anti-Semitism itself that has escaped refutation. The silence that Nazism leaves after it, the silence or

absence of a tradition fighting against anti-Semitism to which WAS could relate today, and finally,the nearly complete lack of public self-reflection on the part of the thinkers, writers, militants andleaders of WAS (What are we doing? What does it mean? How to explain our achievements and/or successes? Are we, in fact, effective? If not, why not? What role do we play in relation to other social and political struggles?), the possibility, in short, that anti-Semitism was not refuted but only“beaten down like a mad dog” – these are the reasons why it has become imperative today atleast to attempt to explain the political significance of the anti-anti-Semitism movement.19 Anadditional purpose of this essay is therefore to lay down some of the premises and conditions thatcould make such an explanation – and evaluation – possible.

I take my first point of departure, then, not only in the recognition of the fact of the struggle againstanti-Semitism and in its scale (if not necessarily in its concerted or organized dimension, whichmay well be lacking), but also in the near complete absence (to the best of my knowledge, at

least) of reflective and indeed concerted gestures on the part of those of us who struggle againstanti-Semitism. We have neither history nor account of the movement we constitute, no descriptionof our unity and/or differences, no sense of our struggle’s relation to, say, Islam and toIslamophobia (this in spite of the accumulated work of Edward Said and his readers; in spite of thehistorical ground and countless cultural markers pointing to a relatedness, and first and foremost to“Semites” as both Arabs and Jews, both Muslims and Jews).20 Over against the abolitionists or today’s human rights activists, we are unknown to ourselves; we are soldiers of a peculiar armythat does not think itself, participants in a war that may know its enemies (or think it does) buthardly its allies.

My second point of departure, implicit in the first but distinct from it, is that WAS must be treatedas a social and political movement, one that is related and in fact comparable (for obvious reasonshaving to do with the mimetic dynamism at work in adversarial relations) to that which it hashistorically opposed. As a movement that vocally proclaims its affinity with, its centrality in, thespread of democracy and freedom, WAS must be presented as, in fact it is (to borrow Arendt’sformulation on anti-Semitism), “an instrument for carrying out a specific ideology; and that ideologymust have won the adherence of many, and even a majority.” And if WAS thus testifies to anideology (taken in the most positive sense of the term, in this context), it remains nonetheless thecase that this ideology “has to persuade and mobilize people.” As Arendt explains, moreover, itcannot choose its targets arbitrarily (Arendt, OT , 6-7). Conducting her inquiry into the intricacies of such an ideology and its mode of functioning, Arendt underscores the historical effort that the workdemands. She likens her own task and perspective to those of the historian (“An ideology which


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has to persuade and mobilize people cannot choose its victims arbitrarily. In other words, if apatent forgery like the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ is believed by so many people that it canbecome the text of a whole political movement, the task of the historian is no longer to discover aforgery. Certainly it is not to invent explanations which dismiss the chief political and historical factof the matter: that the forgery is being believed” [OT , 7]). Is anti-Zionism, for example, identicalwith anti-Semitism? To this ever recurring question Arendt would answer, I think, that the identityor difference between the two matters less than the discursive contribution (and accumulation)made by both “positions” or oppositions with regards to the larger movement that WAS hasbecome. To ask whether anti-Zionism is or is not anti-Semitism, in other words, is to leave

unattended the question of what anti-Semitism “itself” is or has become; what it is believed to be;on what premises does it function across a wide social and political field and, more importantly,how it is made to function and operate – as a non-arbitrary adversary – in relation to a traditionthat may have come about or not. Arendt enables us to ask these important questions. What shedoes, what she enables and enjoins us to do today, could thus accurately be described as“stretching across the borders of political sociology and cultural psychology where political culturesshape the fate – the birth, growth, decline, death and after-life – of traditions.”21

Anatomy of a Movement

“Only in the nationalist imagination, and not in real social history,” writes Mahmood Mamdani, “canmovements emerge full-blown as the Greek goddess Athena is supposed to have done from thehead of Zeus.” Mamdani pursues this argument and explains that

That is why the question we need to ask when assessing the democratic content of a movement isnot just one concerning its geographical sweep, but also one that underlines the social character of its demands: Do they tend toward realizing equality or crystallizing privilege? Are theygeneralizable to other ethnic groups or can they be realized only at the expense of others? In other words, when do they signify a struggle for rights and when a demand for privilege?22

Determining the “geographical sweep” as well as the “social character,” accounting for the politicalsignificance, of anti-Semitism as a mass political movement was precisely what Hannah Arendthad proposed to do. Key to her analysis was an understanding that anti-Semitic movements andparties had elaborated “a consistently supranational approach to politics” ( OT , 3). At the sametime, she called for a recognition of “the moment when social discrimination changed into political

argument,” the dynamic whereby “each class of society which came into conflict with the state assuch became anti-Semitic because the only social group which seemed to represent the statewere the Jews” (25). Regardless of the exhaustiveness or even the level of accuracy of her analysis, Arendt’s approach imparts an essential understanding of two key elements of WAS. First,like anti-Semitism, WAS is “supranational.” That is to say that, to use a less old-fashioned word, itis global. It engages international law and global institutions, non-governmental organizations, aswell as museums and memorials; schools, universities and research centers, as well as literatureand film, media and entertainment, world-famous personalities, educational material and more. Its“geographical sweep” is, simply, the entire world. Second, WAS is a political and social movementthat must be accounted for politically (much like modern anti-Semitism, which often “had politicalrather than economic causes” [OT , 28]) although the economic dimension of WAS does not lack allrelevance: the sources of its means and funding, as well as the social stratification to which ittestifies, interrogates or maintains, or simply preserves and reproduces; the kinds of individuals,

specific classes and groups who engage in militant or sporadic activism on its behalf; the circles of discussion and action; the origin and location of those who intervene as its public representatives or intellectuals; the kinds of platforms it has gained in the global public sphere; the literary and journalistic dissemination of its concerns in newspapers, magazines, professional journals, booksand other publications; the kinds of audiences it reaches or mobilizes, and so forth. All these andmore certainly testify to the economic significance of WAS, as well as to its political significance.Turning our attention to these elements will, moreover, illuminate whether WAS tends “towardrealizing equality” or toward “crystallizing privilege,” as Mamdani asks. Does WAS partake of, is it“generalizable to, other ethnic groups” or can it be “realized only at the expense of others?” Finally,when does WAS “signify a struggle for rights and when a demand for privilege?”


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It is worth repeating, I think, that such an inquiry, even at a most preliminary or rudimentary level,has yet to be initiated or conducted. To the best of my knowledge, no perspective has been offeredon the struggle against anti-Semitism as collective action; none that would explain what it is thatmakes an individual (much less a state) into an opponent of anti-Semitism. There is, as it were, no“grammar of a discourse,” much less a “portrait,” of the anti -anti-Semite.23 Nor is there adescription or an account of WAS in its social and institutional, cultural and political sweep, or of its

rate of success (including, of course, a measure of its failures).24

Yet we can all agree that, in thisurgent case as well, “a perspective that sees a social movement as a simple historical residue or as the unmediated outcome of a policy decision is incapable of explaining it, for it necessarily endsup denying the movement any social history.”25

It seems reasonable to surmise that WAS is part of a lengthy series of political elements andfactors that engage popular, as well as international and geopolitical, issues (Zionism and theexistence of the State of Israel being, I would argue, only one salient case in point). WAS certainlyfunctions as an international movement (not an organization) with its own attributes and particulars.Proximate with, if not necessarily analogous to, the case of anti-Semitism in Arendt’s analysis, thisinternational dimension is essential to contend with even if it does not exhaust the nature of thephenomenon.26 WAS is a movement that has a center (or more precisely, centers) and aperiphery. It operates locally, of course, fighting on distinct battlegrounds that are distributed

unevenly in the social cartography, and on the surface of the globe as well. It is conducted as aprogram of increased vigilance and discourse which involves heads of states, political and culturalfigures, institutions and media, actors, books, journals and countless other sites. It is at work inlegislative assemblies and in international courts (witness the often redundant explosion of legislative activity in France, the U.K., and the U.S., often with an international dimension);27 incrowded museums and in Hollywood studios (from Shoah and countless other documentaries toSpielberg’s feature films and the scrutinization of Mel Gibson’s “life and works,”28 and to theadaptations and showings of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice) and on the streets of New York(“Anti-Semitism is Anti-Me” was the motto of an Anti-Defamation League 2004 campaigndisseminated throughout the city) or the walls of Paris (contested counts of “anti-Semitic acts,”including a number of embarrassing fabrications; intense and unified emotion and repeated publiccondemnations; and a 2004 sensitization campaign by the Jewish Students Organization (UEJF)

with the words ‘sale juif [dirty Jew]’ – sprayed over a representation of Jesus-Christ and other iconic figures), in London and Berlin (with the intensified pursuit of memorialization, or thecontroversy over Günther Grass’s past and merit) as well as in Buenos Aires and Caracas, andeven in Lincoln and Lynchburg. Moreover, we are told that a comparable, if highly distinct, set of WAS battles are being fought (or in need of being fought) in Cairo, Beirut and Teheran, Jerusalemand Baghdad, in truth from Casablanca to Kuala Lumpur via Istanbul and Mumbai. But thesebattles, wherever they are conducted, are also observed or waged from a paradoxical center. In yetanother instance of historical irony (if that is what this is), it is precisely where anti-Semitism hasevolved, where it has historically extended most of its political, psychological and, ultimately,material and physical damage; there where it has claimed to fight for the defense and value of thecivilization from which it grew and in whose name it rose, that WAS is today being fought mostvocally and adamantly. More generally, it is the very site of a culture (or cultures) that hasdeveloped and subsequently taught to and inflicted upon the world “new ideologies of hatred and

new techniques of repression,” that is now pursuing a new pedagogical mission, with anti-Semitismat the top of its list of intolerable offenses.29 The abrupt turn-around and transformation that seemsto have occurred in the Western centers of WAS is made all the more puzzling when seen in thelight of Lyotard’s comments quoted earlier. For the West has quite suddenly become the WorldHeadquarters of WAS, the latter being itself an unprecedented phenomenon.30 The historical recordis quite explicit and by all means well known if not quite attended to. No protracted struggle, noforce of persuasion or sudden flash of understanding has brought anti- Semiti sm to its abrupt (and,if one is to trust current reports, ephemeral) end. Rather, the violent confrontation with theextremities and horrors of its consequences on its own territory made anti-Semitism a kind of


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taboo. The sudden seizure o f the European consciousness (and the intervention of the alliedarmies) is what had beaten anti-Semitism down like a dog. But it did not constitute its refutation(nor did it always contain the eruption of symptoms). And if satisfactory explanations are stilllacking as to what could have brought about the excess of murderous violence wrought by theNazi state, if anti-Semitism remains an enigma (albeit hardly for lack of explanations of the mostdiverse kinds), the general conversion undergone by the same countries and states – andpopulations – the radical shift of policies and ideologies that took place and moved individuals andinstitutions from widespread anti-Semitism to the struggle against it, is hardly less puzzling(consider that the abolition of slavery in the United States did not put an end – sudden or

otherwise – to the racial theories and numerous accompanying practices that were supporting andsurround it). Clearly, this is historically where the language of anti-Semitism was exclusivelyspoken and also where it is no longer possible, nor even tolerable – but what is the nature of thisimpossibility and of the transformation underlying it? Was this a metamorphosis? A temporaryreform? A distinct and novel management of populations and issues? A change in the allocation of social energies and knowledge/power practices? For those of us concerned with and fightingagainst anti-Semitism, there are as of yet no answers available to these questions. Hence, theimportance of considering WAS within a larger context, of reframing what qualifies as the unit andlimits of its analyses and operations.

I have mentioned slavery as a plausible comparative term, but let me suggest, at this juncture thatDonna Haraway proposes just this kind of reframing when she addresses another, parallel shift inWestern prejudices. What Haraway thereby makes palpable is the kind of tortured logic andimplausible trajectories our inquiry must follow (and the historical turns to which it must attend).Thus she points out that “European culture for centuries questioned the humanity of peoples of color and assimilated them to the monkeys and apes in jokes, medicine, religious art, sexualbeliefs and zoology.”31 With decolonization, that is, with “the re-entry of the West into Africa at themoment of decolonization,” man (which is to say, “western, scientific, European, and Euro- American ‘generic’ man”) came to regret his alienation from “nature,” his having been “thrown out of the garden by decolonization and perhaps off the planet by its destruction in ecological devastationand nuclear holocaust.” It is at this particular and abrupt historical juncture, Haraway explains, that“the discourses of exterminism and extinction in space and the jungle” intervene, that theprotection of the environment and of endangered species takes root.32 Today, “for ‘the monkey’ toexist [i.e., as a creature in need of defense and protection – GA], natural variation had to have anenforceable social and technical status of raw material. Historically, this status has depended on

the social relations of extractive colonialism and neo-colonialism.”33 The study and protection of primates (a war on poachers, as it were, and on the nineteenth-century legacy of the “war on Africa” – conducted along clear lines of continuity and still without much regard for its human, localor global, consequences) did not mean that “the ruling elites seriously considered gorilla, lemur,and baboon behavior of crucial national importance,” nor was it the result of “a ground swell of democratic demand to know how gorilla families stay together” or the unmediated demand that theybe protected.34 Still, it did become a global movement, a multifarious network of concernsprojected and operative upon particular regions and populations. The parallels, with all duereservations, should be clear as this is where primatology recasts Orientalism (without canceling it),and where the Third World becomes responsible for the preservation of that which was andcontinues to be destroyed by Europe and the rest of the First World: “Primatology is a First Worldsurvival literature in the conditions of twentieth-century global history.”35 Departing from Haraway’s

insights, and with a raised awareness with regards to similarities and differences, some questionsmay be asked of WAS in equally direct ways: Is it after all the case that the anti-anti-Semitic Westis no longer anti-Semitic? Is its concern with the anti-Semitism of others the sign of a change of heart or a change of policy? What continuities, if any, can be found between the history of anti-Semitism and the current struggle against it?

I have already asserted that, like anti-Semitism (to which it has had to adapt itself), WAS must beconsidered in its international dimensions. I have also tried to indicate, if cursorily, its “local” modeof functioning, the way in which, like anti-Semitism and other forms of political trends (exclusionaryor not), it must be recognized as a social and political movement involving particular groups and


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classes, organizations and individuals. In the remainder of this essay, I want to pursue this inquiryby pointing to elements of WAS that relate to these political, “glocal,” dimensions and to the sensethat political movements are participants or instruments in wider power dynamics. Wittingly or not,they can become – they are – part of an array of symbolic investments, ruling practices, players insocial struggles, or actors in international politics. Consider, as Arendt does, that anti-Semiticparties, when they appeared in the nineteenth century, distinguished themselves by their “originalclaim that they were not a party among parties but a party ‘above all parties’” ( OT , 38). They notonly positioned themselves above the state at a time when the unifying power of the latter wasdeclining, seeking in fact “to become representative of the whole nation, . . . to substitute

themselves for the state,” all the while showing themselves “chiefly concerned with foreign affairs”(ibid.). Their relation to the state put them in a unique position vis-à-vis imperialism, developingclose affinities and colluding with it in more than one way, beginning with their common“supranational organization” (39). When it came to international issues, in other words, anti-Semitesand imperialists “seem to be the only ones who knew the answers to world problems” (41). Thebreadth of horizon, mode of governance, the sharing of technologies of rule, as well as certainpolitical ideals – common to a wide variety of political movements, benevolent or not – is what apolitical sociology of WAS would have to interrogate and analyze. I propose to make a small stepin this direction by pointing to two elements in the political significance of WAS as an internationalmass-movement charged with much psychic and symbolic investment. First is the centrality of thesurvivor in it, a figure whose political dimension was evoked and elaborated upon most eloquentlyby Elias Canetti when he asserted that “the moment of survival is the moment of power.”36 This

will enable us to go on and explore the complex and even contradictory relation between WAS andthe Holocaust and the tradition (or lack thereof) out of which they grow in scholarly andphilosophical discussions, which inform the struggle against anti-Semitism and inevitably partake of WAS. Second, and by way of a conclusion, I want to consider WAS within the context of anancient and well-known phenomenon, the singularly modern emergence (or resurgence) of whichfinds its origins in the colonial period but reached some of its most extreme manifestations in thepostcolonial one. This phenomenon is known by various names, from “communalism” in the Indiansubcontinent to “sectarianism” in the Middle East, “tribalism” in Africa and, more recently,“communautarisme” in France. Yet, the light shed on these movements (for this is, once again,what is at stake here, connected and disconnected social and political movements) by historiansand social scientists suggests that their political significance, indeed, their political existence,manifest, or more precisely proceed from, specific modes of rule and governance. This perspective,if correct, should enable a different framing of these movements taken as a whole (that is, once

again, in a “supranational” perspective) as well as a different framing of WAS. As I offer the outlineof this new frame, the question that will inform my provisional conclusions concerns, therefore, theplace occupied by WAS in national and international modes of governance.

Survival of the Saddest

Crucial to an understanding of WAS and its social and political dimensions is obviously theimmense fact of persecution, as well as the accompanying emotions and feelings – theoverwhelming sadness and loss, the anger and the condemnation – that understandablyaccompany it, lingering long after the devastation it caused has passed. This is a collectivephenomenon, a matter of collective psychology as well as of political sociology of the kind EliasCanetti has studied in a manner uniquely pertinent for our inquiry. Adding essential elements to our

comprehension of social and political movements, and thereby of the nature and genealogy of WAS, Canetti argues, in fact, that there is an essential link between masses or crowds, between“the inner life of a crowd,” and “the feeling of being persecuted” I have just evoked ( CP , 22).Directly related to that feeling and its management are different kinds of crowds and social entitiesas well as, not surprisingly, religions (recall the “hopes and fears” said to define religions, as Humehad it). The novelty of Canetti’s contribution lies in his linking religion to the kind of collectivephenomena that crowds – social and political, as well as psychical and cultural movements –constitute. More precisely, Canetti conceives of certain (not all) religions as managing the energyand instability of crowds. These are some of the prominent “world religions” and they “havesucceeded in holding their crowds” in the most diverse circumstances. They have engaged, in


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other words, in crowd control and in population management. Strongest among these religions,most endowed, that is, with the staying power of resistance and resilience, are those that harnessthe power of loss and lament, that manage to gather their members into packs, and mostparticularly into “lamenting packs” (144). In the social activity of lament, those feelings of persecution typical of crowds are further strengthened as individual members are increasinglybound to each other, collectively expiating their guilt (someone else is dying, if often by the crowd’sown killing) through mournful identification with the one who dies. “They attach themselves to onewho will die for them and, in lamenting him, they feel themselves as persecuted. Whatever theyhave done, however they have raged, for this moment they are aligned with suffering” (145). What

is most peculiar about this complex internal dynamic is that it includes a radical turn and a “suddenchange of side.” Members of the pack – and of a religion of lament – ritually undergo atransformation, a conversion, as it were, from persecutor to persecuted, from killer to victim . Theysee themselves as victims of their own offense, and thereby lament a loss of – literally – their own.Where they previously exercised violence and indeed murder, they now suddenly proceed to mournthemselves as victims of that very violence. Canetti concludes this section of his rapidly narrowingand pointed analysis (which moves from crowd to pack, and from religions, in the plural, to onesingular religion) with the following statement: “the most important of all the religions of lament isChristianity” (ibid.). This is not to say that Christianity is the only religion of lament, of course. Nor that it is the only religion that manages (or aggrandizes) the crowd and its feelings of persecution.There are, according to Canetti, other religions that institutionalize and organize the metamorphosisof group identity within them, that perform within themselves that most curious and sudden change

of side from persecutor to persecuted. Christianity is, however, the most important among suchreligions.37 What does this importance consist of? Later on, Canetti will account for it by attendingto the massive, global reach of Christianity, but also by relating the heightened feeling of persecution that expresses itself in the sudden transformation just described (“when killers becomevictims,” as i t were ) , as well as in the sense of superiority, indeed, of triumph that opera tes in itas well. Christianity, one could say without forcing Canetti’s description, is not only a religion of lament, it is the religion of the triumph of lament, an unexpected version of the “triumph of thespirit” of the persecuted survivor.

As could be expected, fear and hope continue to play a central role in this history of collectivepsychology, but not (as Mamdani makes clear in a different, if related context) in a consistent, a-historical way. Fear in particular is at work, “not as a relatively timeless cultural reflex but as amuch more time-bound response to a rapidly shifting political and social context.”38 There would be

events, certain configurations of events that might give rise to such emotions. To be sure,Horkheimer and Adorno had already made clear that these – “repressed mimesis,” “not projectivebehavior as such, but the absence from it of reflection,” “the dazzling power of false immediacy,”“paranoiac forms of consciousness,” and “a delusion of persecution that accepts the persecution towhich domination must necessarily lead” – are all elements of anti-Semitism.39 More importantly(and this is my argument in the wake of Canetti), there is the unsettling possibility that these alsomake up, as if by sudden conversion, the very elements of the struggle against anti-Semitism.

If WAS is a social and political movement, and a successful one at that, it would be because itpartakes of an understanding of politics in which we have all come to share. It is thisunderstanding, this collective practice, that Canetti illuminates. WAS may not fully determine our understanding of politics, but it is surely determined by it and by the figures it invokes or deploys.In this context, it might be important to consider the argument made by Lee Edelman on the role of

such figures and their temporal dimension. For Edelman, we seem unable “to conceive of politicswithout a fantasy of the future.” Key to this inability is a logic (“the absolute logic of reproduction,”as Edelman calls it) sustained by the figure of the child, without whom we cannot conceive of thefuture or of politics. “That figural Child alone embodies the citizen as an ideal, entitled to claim fullrights to its future share in the nation’s good.”40 From the rebellion of the sons against the fathersand, more generally, from the antagonistic relations to dead ancestors to the significance of anarrative of conception that figures the spermatozoa as survivor of a hecatomb (“all thespermatozoa except one perish”),41 the political figure that Canetti describes silently resonates withEdelman’s, for it is fundamentally linked to reproduction and to its interruption, its result: the child.


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Edelman’s child, in other words, is Canetti’s survivor. At once prop and ideal, site of “all man’sdesigns on immortality,” embodiment of a superiority that promises or embodies the survival of thefittest (“Fortunate and favoured, the survivor stands in the midst of the fallen. For him there is onetremendous fact: while countless others have died, many of them his comrades, he is still alive”),42

the survivor as child – the child as survivor – is thus the end of all genealogies, the last of theinvulnerable heroes (the fathers) as well as the model of all despotic rulers (hence, “the intensestfeeling for power is that found in a ruler who wants no son” [ CP , 245]). He is at once the politicalparadigm and its most extreme instantiation, within and without the realm of the human. Indeed,like Canetti, Edelman sees in the function of this crucial and widespread figure a religiousdimension that extends over and beyond the human. For him, the child is “the prop of the secular theology on which our social reality rests: the secular theology that shapes at once the meaning of our collective narratives and our collective narratives of meanings.”43 Freudian echoes of a “sonreligion” notwithstanding (in Moses and Monotheism), it is clear that what Canetti and Edelmandiagnose continues to have a religious character, which, however particular it may have been inthe past, has now acquired a quasi-universal, indeed, global dimension. No matter how conflictingand conflicted the visions of politics we uphold, these all “share as their presupposition that thebody politic must survive.”44 The ideal of survival, the survivor and the child as figures, models andideals that confirm and transcend the bounds of the community, are thus revealed as coextensive.Together they are one model. At once political and individual model, hero and victim, the survivor is the child and the child is the survivor. He is the novel figure, if not the ground, of modernpolitics.45

It may be surprising (and to my knowledge, it is at any rate unique) that, writing in the late 1950s,at a time in which World War II stories of surviving children and adolescents were becomingwidespread (Elie Wiesel in France and Ka-tzetnik in Israel are examples that may come to mind),Canetti would have offered such a negative picture of the survivor, an apocalyptic conception hemaintains to the very end, as the culmination of his reflections on “masses and power” (“thesurvivor is mankind’s worst evil, its curse and perhaps its doom. Is it possible for us to escape him,even now at this last moment?” [468]). To be fair, Canetti does not direct his argument atHolocaust survivors in particular, although the paradigmatic value he grants the very figure of thesurvivor certainly seems to resonate with the iconic status then reached by Holocaust survivors inthe political culture. I suppose, moreover, that one may feel somewhat inclined to refrain fromendorsing Canetti’s evaluation even while keeping in mind that he is not speaking of the survivor per se (as if survivors themselves were to blame for the cultural and political response they have

elicited; as if Primo Levi had offered the survivor rather than the Muselmann – about whom I willhave more to say below – as “an image for our time”). But what seems harder to deny or at leastignore is the pertinence of his argument as the basis for a reflection that would concern itself withthe prominence and centrality of the figure of the survivor in current politics and culture (a centralityand a popularity that ultimately shines, it must be acknowledged, an important but somehowbanalizing light on its role in WAS). Clearly, it is in wider circles that the survivor “has been glorifiedas a hero and obeyed as a ruler” (ibid.).46 It is also a general and extensive fact today that “thesurvivor is himself afraid. He has always been afraid but with his vast new potentialities his fear has grown too, until it is almost unendurable. . . . Whether or not he is actually in danger fromenemies, he always feels himself menaced” (469). The entirety of the “surviving condition” – theinhuman condition, Canetti would perhaps say echoing Arendt – is a recent development, and onethat is contemporaneous with the sudden shifts and conversions I have described earlier, whereby

the sites of anti-Semitism’s worst excess (and the site of enduring racial fears – poorly disguisedas “demographic concerns” – and of an entire “culture of fear”) have now become the radiatingcenters of WAS and of an old-new kind of world politics.47 There are the surviving centers of thegreatest among the religions of lament, whose legacy, writes Canetti, is “greater than might besupposed” (467).

“There is no-one who suffers persecution, for whatever reason, who does not in part of his mindsee himself as Christ.” So Canetti pursues his argument placing Christianity and the Christianimaginary at the center of a reflection on the survivor. And indeed, the dissemination of Christ asparadigm has grown in unprecedented ways since the advent of colonialism and of ever more


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modern technologies of missionizing. Christ’s image (literally so, at times) has undoubtedly“become part of the consciousness of mankind. He is the dying man and the man who ought not todie.” Through him, “the value of the individual has become not less, but more.” In him, is man’s“desire for indestructibility justified. Each feels himself a worthy object of lament; each is stubbornlyconvinced that he ought not to die. Here the legacy of Christianity . . . is inexhaustible” (467).Christian theologians have long made clear that Auschwitz was, for them, a new figuration of thePassion, and critics have remarked on the Christological role played by the Jews in Christianresponses to the Holocaust.48 But the important or at least central dimension within which thiswidespread victimology and other aspects of WAS must be understood, as the growing political andsocial moment it has become, is not primarily anti-Semitism (or its earlier form of Gentile Christiananti-Judaism), which always played an internal role anyway, even and perhaps especially in theabsence of Jews. What is at stake rather is the cult of the survivor in the dominant religion of lament through its historical transformations.

Amos Funkenstein is obviously correct when he writes that “to argue that only a Christian worldcould have led to a genocide is, to say the least, hypocritical.”49 But given that the Christian worlddid lead to and host one particular, and perhaps the most brutal, genocidal endeavor, given that itcontinues to adhere (ever in novel and changing forms) to political models that echo or reproduceearlier conceptions, that remain, in fact, theologico-political models; given that the westernChristian world has proceeded to embrace, indeed, initiate and foster, disseminate and wage WAS,it seems essential to understand the earlier (and enduring) forms taken by parallel or comparable

types of political practice, as well as the precedents it has and which it has altered to this day. Inthis specific context, more space would obviously be needed to elaborate on the function of theconceptual opposition between image and figure, between example and exception, and the role itplays. Is the particular history of anti-Semitism an example (of, say, universal hatred) or anexception? Does the Holocaust constitute a paradigm according to which one could establish or dismiss measures of comparability? Conversely, should these two phenomena (and the distinction – or lack thereof – between them) be viewed as exemplary? And if so, of what? Were one toargue that there are (or could be) comparable phenomena in other cultures or in other periods, theburden thereby created toward an argument would be on providing a ground for comparability (ruleand example? Rule and exception? Equivalent examples?). As Giorgio Agamben has compellinglyargued, one may have to conceive otherwise of comparison itself for even if “the exception issituated in a symmetrical position with respect to the example,” it is nonetheless the case that thelatter “forms a system” with the former. 50 Arguing in terms of historical comparison, Funkenstein’s

position is that modern anti-Semitism and the Holocaust are not instances of the ancient conflictbetween Christianity and Judaism. On the other hand, in tracing the history of “the exemplary places of modern biopolitics: the concentration camp and the structure of the great totalitarianstates of the twentieth century,” Agamben locates himself at the almost precise opposite. 51 I write“almost” because, over against a number of thinkers and scholars, Funkenstein is nonethelessadamant about not treating the Holocaust as an absolute exception. While Agamben seeks tomaintain, if also to generalize, the exception – as rule. Funkenstein and Agamben are themselvesexemplary, as it were, in the clarity they bring to the issues, and in the probity with which theyengage the complexities of the matter at hand. Neither of them is arguing that the Holocaust is notunique. It is. But the tension between example and exception (and their respective reference to theuniversal and to the rule) has everything to do with history, as both interpretation andtransformation of the world. More important, therefore, and more striking, is the fact that the twoscholars are agreeing on what not to compare, on what the Holocaust and its conditions of possibility do not refer or relate to. Phrased in a more general way that transcends their particular arguments, their agreement consists in the following: whether exemplary or exceptional, modernanti-Semitism and the Holocaust are not to be understood with reference to Christianity (by whichis meant, of course, Western Christendom and the history of its relation to Jews and Judaism). Wehave begun to see how this is the case for Funkenstein, who is quite explicit on the subject. I willtherefore turn briefly to Agamben in order to substantiate my claim for what the two scholarsshare. But before I do so let me quickly mention that the study of the historical and contemporaryrelations between Nazism and Christianity (not just th e Na zis and the Catholic Church) hasalready made many advances, even i f these are still ongoing.52


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Recall that what remains at stake here is the paradigmatic nature of the survivor for anunderstanding of WAS, and most particularly, of the Holocaust survivor. To acknowledge thisparadigm is hardly to make a contentious claim, of course, and Agamben’s work – including hiscontribution to having made manifest the visible invisibility of that exemplary example, as it were,that are the “Muslims” – and its impact in the public, or at least academic, sphere would certainlyconfirm it.53 One could further argue, after Agamben, that if the camp is the nomos of modernpolitics, then the survivor is its main, if not its only, inhabitant. He is the subject of modern politics.He is therefore equally paradigmatic. This is why in his rigorous focus on “the testimonies of

survivors,” Agamben can nonetheless claim that these make manifest a universal, philosophicalproblem, namely, that “testimony contained at its core an essential lacuna.” This is why he canwrite that “the aporia of Auschwitz is, indeed, the very aporia of historical knowledge: a non-coincidence between facts and truth, between verification and comprehension.”54 Testimony andsurvival are fundamentally linked, of course, since “in the camp, one of the reasons that can drivea prisoner to survive is the idea of becoming a witness” (15). Finally, it is also the case that “PrimoLevi is a perfect example of the witness” (16). But note that Levi is only one example (amongpotential or actual others, therefore). Yet he is an example of the witness as well as of the survivor.Throughout, Agamben will in fact refer to the witness and to the survivor as equivalent terms, andso for obvious and justifiable reasons.

There comes a moment, however, when the equivalence breaks down. Yet, this moment does notconstitute the end of the paradigm but rather its culmination. Agamben never denies nor qualifies

the claim that the survivor is the paradigmatic witness. On the contrary, he argues that the survivor gives us access to a further, even more exemplary, instance of the witness. Doing so, Agambenscrupulously follows Levi, of course, who himself named the Muslims in his famous description of “the drowned” or “the submerged.” Agamben quotes Levi as the latter insists on the distinction(rather than equivalence) between survivor and witness in order to explain that “we, the survivors,are not the true witnesses.” Those who are, that is, “those who saw the Gorgon, have not returnedto tell about it or have returned mute, but they are the Muslims, the submerged, the completewitnesses, the ones whose deposition would have a general significance.”55 For Agamben, what isthereby confirmed is the exception as rule, or, in other words, the exception as paradigm. That iswhy Agamben writes that “Auschwitz is precisely the place in which the state of exceptioncoincides perfectly with the rule and the extreme situation becomes the very paradigm of dailylife.”(49)

If the witness – the Muslim – is the paradigm of the survivor, it is because the survivor is theexemplary figure of the camp, while the camp is itself the paradigm of “modern politics.” Thisconcise, and essential, argument, which Agamben had made earlier, engages our understanding of WAS if only because of the massive and enduring, if still largely anacknowledged, significance of the “ferocious irony” (in Agamben’s own phrase) that brings together, in Auschwitz and elsewhere,Jews and Muslims. I have already presented my own argument on this issue and do not want toburden this essay with a rehearsal of it, however brief.56 The rest of this paper, moreover, willcontinue to explore additional links between Jews and Muslims, Jews and Arabs, and their joinedpertinence toward an understanding of WAS, together with the larger, distributive political framewithin which the latter operates. By way of a conclusion for this section, I want instead to return tothe history of politics traced by Agamben and note the iterative status of a configuration that placesthe survivor at the center of politics (Canetti, Agamben) as well as the relevance (or irrelevance, as

the case may be) of Christianity as the name and form of politics, of what we call the Westernpolitical tradition (Canetti, Agamben, Funkenstein). Let me immediately underscore that whenpursuing the particular task of tracing the history – or the metaphysics – of Western politics, Agamben has very little to say about Christianity, and although he dedicates an intenselycommitted volume to Saint Paul, it is unclear to me (and at any rate, textually invisible) what theconnection might be between Christianity – assuming, of course, that this is what Paul (that is, Agamben’s Paul) might stand for – and Western politics. The absence of Christianity from Agamben’s sustained argument in Homo Sacer (an argument for which the Muslim provides, as Ihave said, the culmination), that absence may never be as clear as it becomes at the momentwhen, after having insisted that the word “sacer” in “homo sacer” is not to be understood as


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belonging to the sphere of “religion” (“we will try to interpret sacratio as an autonomous figure, andwe will ask if this figure may allow us to uncover an originary political structure that is located in azone prior to the distinction between sacred and profane, religious and juridical”), 57 after havingargued that scholars who resolutely located the link between “the two bodies of the king” in theChristian, indeed, Christological tradition, had missed the Roman link (to the origins of “ homosacer ”), Agamben writes the following:

If the symmetry we have tried to illustrate between the body of the sovereign and that of homosacer is correct, then we ought to be able to find analogies and correspondences in the juridico-

political status of these two apparently distant bodies. (102)

One such analogy or correspondence, indeed, one example of the link between the sovereign bodyand the abandoned, abjected body may come to mind, as it has to the mind of countless medievalwriters, jurists and others, and later to that of countless medievalists (some of whom are quoted by Agamben). But that peculiar figure of sovereignty and abjection, of example and exception, thatChrist is does not appear to have come to Agamben’s mind. Theology, let alone, religion, muchless Christianity – none of these come to mind (prompted perhaps, or rather un-prompted by afocus on the juridico-political, rather than on the theologico-juridico-political). It is as if the entireunderstanding of political theology, upon which Agamben’s sources rely (Schmitt and Benjamin,and Kantorowicz as well) was no longer relevant, as if Christianity was exclusively a theological,not a political – let alone a bio-political – tradition. Agamben makes this ever more evident whenhe announces the indubitable significance of his own insight for an understanding of modernpolitics and of the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis. For him – but we have seen that he isnot at all alone (he may, in fact, be exemplary ) – “the dimension in which the extermination tookplace is neither religion nor law, but biopolitics” (114). From Roman law to Hobbes (directly so) andall the way to the Nazis, the history of Western politics has little to do with religion, and even less,it seems, with one religion – one bio-theologico-political tradition – in particular (example?Exception?), namely, Christianity. This would be to suggest that the very religion – the very political religion – whose Western history and chapters can be traced as the history of anti-Semitism, in itsdifferent forms, bears no relation (no contingent relation, nor a necessary one) to the event thatmade most horribly manifest the very structure of modern politics, and of Western politics assuch.58 Now, if WAS is a political movement, as I have been arguing, and if, true to its sources in“the religion of lament,” the survivor is its paradigmatic figure; if the “complete witness” to theextermination of the Jews at the heart of Christian Europe was called – exceptionally or

paradigmatically – “Muslim,” it would seem that Canetti’s insight into Western Christendom is either invalid – or, if it has yet to be invalidated, in fact, that it remains to be contended with. Only bydeciding upon this alternative, will we give ourselves the means to reach an understanding of WASand of the tradition (or lack thereof) in which it finds its source and strength. Clearly though, weneed to pursue the inquiry yet further.

Unite and Rule? The Politics of WAS

It is a notorious tactic of political power to deny a distinct unity to populations it seeks to govern, totreat them as contingent and indeterminate. The strategy of disaggregating subject populations inorder better to administer them does not require a ‘pure and settled past’ – all it requires is amanipulable, re-creatable present.

—Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion

Politics, as we have been considering it, is a tradition (a diversity of traditions) of social movementsthat deploys, for overdetermined reasons, specific historical and political, as well as religious,figures. It is also a tradition of governance, a way to rule, manage or treat groups of people,masses of them, on a local and international stage. And politics is also war, of course, by other andnot so other means. According to legal scholar Karl-Heinz Ziegler, it was Abu Hanifa, a Muslimthinker and founder of one of the major Islamic schools of juridical interpretation, “who first forbadethe killing of women, children, the elderly, the sick, monks, and other noncombatants. He alsocondemned rape and the killing of captives.” Commenting on the effects of his recommendations


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on the history of law, and more importantly, on the history of war, it is again Sven Lindqvist whopoints out that the attempt has yet to succeed “to make war more humane by setting forth rulesthat were not accepted in Europe until several centuries later.”59 Indeed, it seems fair to say that,to this day, such rules are “still not accepted, or in any case not practiced, when colored people[are] involved” (ibid.). It is as if the struggle for the rights of the oppressed had an extendedtradition but one that was, if not absent (as is the case with WAS), surely ineffective. Like anyother struggle, it had to contend with, and adapt itself to, evolving modes of rules, management of populations, and technologies of power many of which rendered possible the most atrocious acts of war and genocide in human history, culminating with the Holocaust. This is why I want to turn tothat other side of social and political movements – the government and management of populations – in order to demonstrate its relevance for the struggle that is WAS today.

Until World War II, the bomb served as a major instrument in these technologies of rule andmanagement. The bomb has served as one of the main tools of the legal and practicaldifferentiation between white Europeans (and Euro-Americans) and the rest of the “colored people”world. More specifically, as Lindqvist painstakingly documents, it was not just any bomb but itsevolved, modern version, the bomb dropped from airplanes. “Airplanes and bombs were examplesof progress in military technology. And technology was civilization . . . Bombs were a means of civilization” (34). The first bomb – the first “civilizing” bomb – ever dropped from an airplaneexploded on November 1, 1911. It came from an Italian machine flying over North Africa. Itsgeographical target was an oasis near Tripoli. Its human targets were Arabs. By 1924, by the time

of the bombing of the town of Chechaouen, “bombing natives was considered quite natural. TheItalians did it in Libya, the French did it in Morocco, and the British did it throughout the MiddleEast, in India, and East Africa, while the South Africans did it in Southwest Africa” (74). By 1939,Hitler had embraced and enhanced this tradition, deciding that “Poland shall be treated as acolony. . . . In short: the ruthless expansionist policies carried out by Italy in Ethiopia and Libya,Spain in Morocco, the United States in the Philippines, and the Western European democracies of Belgium, Holland, France and England throughout Asia and Africa for more than 100 years werenow brought home to Europe by Hitler and applied in an even more brutal form to the Poles” (83).Such colonial policies and practices, along with improved technological and legal means, theaccumulation of decades of “race science” and eugenics, made the Nazi genocide of Jews, Sintiand Roma possible, along with the massive incarcerating and killing of communists andhomosexuals, and the incendiary bombing of almost every major city in Europe (if not only there)by both German and Allied planes and rockets. The technology of the civilizing mission had come

home to roost. Aimé Césaire speaks of this movement as of “a terrific boomerang effect” inflictedon the European bourgeoisie, indeed, on the European population at large.60 It is about them thatCésaire comments that before they suffered from Nazism “before they were its victims, they wereits accomplices . . . they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, . . . they absolved it,shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because until then, it had been applied only to non-Europeanpeoples.” “Yes,” writes Césaire, “it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps takenby Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christianbourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him.”Equally important (and perhaps more so), is the fact that this collective subject cannot forgive Hitler for his crime, for the humiliation, for “the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures whichuntil then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the ‘coolies’ of India, and the“niggers” of Africa” (ibid.).

As I have already suggested, airplanes and bombs were only the most recent among the rulinginstruments dispensed and deployed by the civilizing mission of Christian Europe upon “coloredpeople.” Law and education, Christian missionaries and the production of local elites, all thebenevolent (that is, less bloody) techniques summarized under the old principle of “divide and rule,”had long been efficient means of transforming and civilizing, that is to say exploiting, ruling andoften, if not always, eradicating or exterminating communities and ways of life. Writing of Algeria inthe 1830s and 1840s, Alexis de Tocqueville is well aware of the fine nuances of political andmilitary rules and their effects and he unapologetically advocates a view from above that wouldlater become the pilot’s vantage point, although distinct from it as well. Tocqueville affirms theimportance of distinguishing between “the two great races” – Arabs and Berbers (or Kabyles) – that


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inhabit the conquered land. “It is obvious that we must tame these men through our arts and notthrough our weapons ( il est évident que c’est par nos arts et non par nos armes qu’il s’agit dedompter de pareils hommes).”61 But the distinction he proposes goes further than the recognitionof different races, and of different ruling techniques. It is more refined, more discriminating. Itdivides reality and redistributes knowledge along novel lines. “With the Kabyles, one must addressquestions of civil and commercial equity; with the Arabs, questions of politics and religion” (ibid.). Itis not just that there is a difference between Kabyle and Arab, then, but also that the veryepistemological realm to which each “group” or “community” belongs or is allocated is, in fact,different. Further on, Tocqueville will calibrate his concerns further, zooming in on the distinctionbetween religion and politics. It is imperative, he says, to downplay the religious hostility thatopposes the Muslims to the French – the latter being clearly perceived, and perceiving themselves,as Christians. Instead, Muslims must be made to feel that their religion is under threat, thatcolonialism is not a war of religion. The goal of this pacification (an infamous euphemism, if thereever was one) is nonetheless clear. “Thus, religious passions will finally die down and we shallhave only political enemies in Africa” (59). Tocqueville understands that the distinction betweenreligion and politics is quite tenuous and difficult to maintain in Algeria and elsewhere. Still, indefining the political enemy as distinct from the religious enemy, he is forcefully deploying thedivision of knowledge that we have already encountered (if precisely inverted), one mostcharacteristic of Orientalist and imperial practices, and that enables the division of populationsalong distinct lines of belonging and classification. Hence, Muslims must not be made to feel thattheir religion is in danger, but that is because the goal is to have – to recognize – only political

enemies. War is thus negotiated first by determining the battlefield as political, and subsequently (or simultaneously) by restricting, then denying, its religious dimension. Indeed, what must beprevented is precisely the awareness that what opposes France to Algeria is religious difference.What must be prevented is the religious association that could transcend local divisions or disableorganized resistance against the French conquerors. “The only common idea that can link andrelate all the tribes that surround us is religion. The only common feeling upon which one could relyin order to subjugate them [and therefore lead them], is hatred against the foreigner and the infidelwho came to invade their land” (103). Religion and politics therefore appear as strategic divisions,fighting terms, as it were, which not only distinguish between communities but also within them for military and ruling purposes. Kabyles and Arabs are thus not onl y distinguished on the basis of race, they are also said to belong to diffe rent realms (commerce on the one hand, religion andpolitics on the other). And the separation of realms, the distinction between religion and politics,further divides communities from themselves. It disables the possibility of collective action, the

ability to recognize, and fight, the true enemy. Still, whatever its success, it is revealed as atechnology of rule and governance.

The technological sophistication of colonial divisions harks back to ancient and well-tried principles(such as “divide et impera”), but like the bomb and the airplane, they combine earlier techniqueswith new scientific advances. Commerce and politics, race and religion – spheres of modernity inits benevolent and fighting faces – such as they were deployed in the colonies of Christian Europecame to function as divisions of knowledge whereby old alliances, different conceptions of community and of sociability, older forms of identity, were renamed, reshaped, abolished, andindeed, destroyed. Contemporaneous with Tocqueville’s visits in Algeria, Jesuit missionaries weredeploying the same means of distributing knowledge, the same divisive understanding, aimed tocreate “pure Christian spaces” in Mount Lebanon.62 They expressed “revulsion at the interminglingof Muslim and Christian, at the Christian’s practice of adopting Muslim names, and at their habitual

invocation of the prophet Muhammad.”

We are sorry, these Jesuits wrote, that there was a sort of coexistence [ fusion] between theChristians and the Muslims of Sayda. They visited each other frequently, which resulted in intimaterelations between them and which introduced, bit by bit, a community of ideas and habits all of which was at the expense of the Christians. These latter joined in the important Muslim feasts, andthe Muslims [in turn] joined in the Christian feasts; this kind of activity passed for good manners,sociability, while in truth it resulted in nothing more than the weakening of religious sentiments.63

The “danger” of coexistence was to be prevented not only by separating communities, but by


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dividing them from themselves, from their own habits and practices, by fostering a different divisionof reality. The modern separation of spheres described by Max Weber, and by Karl Marx beforehim, found its origins and terrain of application in particular technologies of governing, embodiedtechnologies that divided populations, but also divided colonial labor: the missionary is neither settler nor diplomat, the governor is neither priest nor general. They do not serve the samefunction. In the colonies, this complex political, religious, military and economic apparatus, thisnovel technology, divided Druze from Maronite, Arab from Berber, Hindu from Muslim, and Hutufrom Tutsi. It marks a rupture and a beginning, a very modern beginning of communalism, of sectarianism. In Mount Lebanon, it marks “the birth of a new culture that singled out religious

affiliation as the defining public and political characteristic of a modern subject and citizen." 64 InIndia, it puts into place the essential (even if not inevitable) premises of partition. Moreover, and ina way that remains more difficult to recognize but to which Tocqueville alerts us, the newtechnologies of colonial divisions were at their most efficient in the realm of knowledge. Theseforms of “colonialist knowledge” were about restructuring knowledge and functioned so as toseparate religion from politics, politics from commerce, and commerce from religion and politics. 65

And each of these separations was enacted, incarnated in the restructuring, the management of communities and that soon to be invented object of demography, “populations." 66 The point wasless to eradicate enmity, as Tocqueville makes clear, than to manage enemies, to rule anddiscipline them by refusing to grant them political identities or preventing their unification on thebasis of religion. Colonial rule and knowledge was about preventing religion from becoming politics,hiding that conquest and commerce were a Christian enterprise, in which Christian powers

competed but also collaborated. Not just divide and rule, then, but divide knowledge and rule,calling one group a race, another a religion, a third a polity. 67 Calling this religion, and calling thatrace; calling this commerce, and calling that science.

Like the bomb and the airplane, which were exported and imported in and out of Europe, colonialrule, along with its theologico-political divisions, along with race science and legal devices to claimterritories or redistribute land, was practiced outside of Europe and inside it as well. The balancingmovement between Europe and the “colored world” is, however, a complicated one. It is said, for example, that Columbus took an Arabic speaking Jewish translator with him, for he thought hewould thus be able to communicate with the natives of India, whom he expected to encounter. Inthe conclusion of this essay, I want to turn briefly to a major site of WAS – its role in thereproduction and the enforcement of the division between Jews and Arabs – in order to describesome of the ways in which the dividing lines that continue to separate these “groups” have been

constructed by means of technologies of rule and governance such as I have been describing sofar.

Jews and Arabs

In-dissociable in the theological and political imagination of Western Christendom as well as in therich history of their social and cultural contacts, Jews and Arabs continue to function asparadigmatic markers of distance and antagonism rather than proximity and affinity. To this too, theMuslims of Auschwitz bear witness. But this is increasingly the case in France, the United Statesand, of course, Israel/Palestine, and beyond a geographical logic that seems to maintain anEast/West division. More and more visibly (or so one hopes – and fears) the antagonism betweenJews and Arabs operates, like the colonial technologies I was just describing, on a number of

levels and dimensions: historical (Holocaust versus colonialism), sociological (sexual difference,anti-Semitism versus islamophobia), political (the hegemony of liberal, secular democracies and theso-called “war on terror”) and religious (the “judeo-christian tradition”). Following Edward Said, Ihave argued elsewhere that these dimensions partake of two histories that have been keptseparated for strategic reasons, two histories that come under the headings of “Islam and theWest” and “Europe and the Jews.” I conclude, therefore, with the (only seemingly paradoxical)claim that these two histories are, in fact, one, of which WAS is an essential, novel and not sonovel, moment: the singular management of Jew and Arab in Western Christendom through itstransformations (Roman Catholicism, Reformation, Secularism, WAS). I argue, in other words, for the provisional articulation of a Semitic perspective which may underscore the historical nature –


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and historical extension – of WAS.

Let me begin toward this goal by quoting again from the description by Jesuits of the coexistence,ta‘ayush or convivencia, that existed between Christians and Muslims on Mount Lebanon.

They visited each other frequently, which resulted in intimate relations between them and whichintroduced, bit by bit, a community of ideas and habits all of which was at the expense of theChristians. These latter joined in the important Muslim feasts, and the Muslims [in turn] joined inthe Christian feasts; this kind of activity passed for good manners, sociability, while in truth it

resulted in nothing more than the weakening of religious sentiments.68

There is no question that this kind of coexistence is predicated on vastly different understandings of political rule and legal regime, social relations and collective identity, a distinct distribution of resources as well as a different way of negotiating violence and conflict. For better or for worse, itis the kind of coexistence (what Marc Abélès has called “convivance”) that was brought to an endwith modernity. In the specific case of the Jews, the transformation entailed a reflected division, alogic of separation that was meant to increase

When Killers Become Victims

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