French philosopher Alain Badiou gave this interview to Le Monde last week. The original title was about the crisis of the intellectual Left. While the first two questions focused on the crisis of the French Left, most of the interview was about the particularisms lying at the foundations of Israel as a Jewish only state. Badiou speaks with clarity on matters which appear to be complexe in the news, using fundamental philosophical concepts like Truth, History, Universals, and Universalism (as opposed to Particularisms and exceptionnalism).
Le Monde: You are, since the publication of Circonstance, 3. Portées du mot "Juif" (The Uses of the word "Jew"), at the heart of an intellectual controversy because of your position on Israel, a position some believe is favourable to the disappearance of Israel as a state. What is your opinion on this ?
Alain Badiou: I believe this controversy, if taken at its highest and most coherent level, is about the existence of universals. What is the relation between the word "jew", in its entire extension, its historical and intellectual resonance, and the liberating and emancipating effect of universalism? Universalism is attacked from the Right, which maintains that we should return to the values of Nations, Traditions, Religion, Family values, etc. Universalism is also under attack from the Left which maintains that abstract Universalism is a form of intellectual Imperialism or an abstraction of the global market (or global economy) against which sexual, racial, and communautarian identities should be defended. In this debate, I stand in the middle, even if I am considered as a radical. I oppose the traditionalist defence of moral, national, and religious identities, but I oppose the modernist position on this matter which pretends to defend identities by making them the center and the principal player in the political opposition to international Capitalism. It is in this context that I consider the word "jew".
Le Monde: Why reduce the whole question to a word ? Isn't a reality ?
Alain Badiou: Certainly ! It is the same with the word "French"... However "being French" does not prevent me from being from a Moroccan origin, or a hereditary aristocrat, or half German, having this or this idea about my country, inheriting the French revolution or on the contrary a fetichistic vision of the land... Under a word, of variable value, we can find an infinite multiplicity. My problem is that I am against those who think that "jew" is a name, and not a word, those who insist that this word forms a homogenous and unified assembly non reductible to something else. In my opinion, their position can only be tenable in the case of divine transcendance. In this case, and in this case alone, we can argue that "jew" is a name and not a word, because it is bound to an elective space: "jew" is the name of the alliance. I argue, as Lévinas did before me in a coherent way, that it is impossible to maintain this nominal exception without the support of religion.
My target in this critique is not Zionism, neither the existence of Israel, not even a certain type of relation between the identity and the state. My target is the ideological manipulation of the word "jew" in the intellectual controversy you mentioned, especially in France where it serves some goals linked to the reactionary wave in which we have been immersed for about thirty years now.
It would be terrible for the Jews, this living multiplicity, to let the word that defines them - which has a close relationship, going on for so many years before, with the formidable question of the universals and the adventures of universalism - to become the symbol of modernised Capitalism, anti-Arab or anti-African xénophobia, and US wars. I notice, with a real sorrow, that many people to whom I was close, sometimes dear friends, who in the 70s used to gravitate around revolutionary Maoism (he is talking probably about André Glucksman, staunch supporter now of Sarkozy), have started slowly using the reference to the word "jew" and to Israel as a support for something politically and intellectually more large, that can be identified as an attempt to reintegrate the West. By "West" I mean the group of developped and "democratic" countries, their power, their way of life, which are judged superior. The unprecedented trauma that was the extermination of Europe's jews in the Nazis gaz chambers has rendered this manipulation redoutable because it strikes the thought and immobilises it in a conservative memory.
Le Monde: You are accused of attacking the memory of the Shoah, or at least its usage. Is it because it served the itinerary you just denounced ?
Alain Badiou: I think that the promotion of massacres and victims as the only interesting contents to History is linked to a profound process of depolitisation. To examine all historical situations exclusively through moral categories results in political impotence. On the other hand, I don't think memory is a good category if we want the non repetition of disasters, because the non repetition assumes a rational judgement about what happened. An emotional memory based on horror and its images is ambivalent. Discerning between what follows from a repulsive emotion and an emotion of fascination is very difficult. Yes, I mistrust memory, the memory of colonial atrocities, or the memory of Stalinism, as much as the memory of Nazism. Political and historical knowledge should universally become the alternatives for doubtful memory that is a designated prey for propaganda.
le Monde: Is it in this same vein that you suggest in Circonstances, 3 that we forget the Holocaust ?
Alain Badiou: This sentence, which appeared in an interview I gave to Haaretz, was, as you may suspect, a carefully designed imprudence: it cannot be understood outside the context specific to the conditions of a possible dialogue between Palestinians and Israelis. My next sentence, that you don't cite here, made it clear that the forgetting is, in fact, impossible.
Le Monde: Isn't Israel's legitimacy, at least in the West, tied to the memory of the Shoah ?
Alain Badiou: Things must be clear. I never thought that the destiny of Israelis is to be pushed into the sea. Moreover, I don't think that the question of Israel's frontiers is at the heart of the problem. From the internal perspective of an assumed de facto situation, in other words, the settlement of hundred thousands of jews in this place being irreversible, I still think that the regulating idea for a future for the region cannot be anything else than a common life and destiny for Palestinians and Jews on the same land. I always thought that the formula of a "jewish state" is perilous. Today, the politic of emancipation dictate that national identities and states should not be defined exclusively in terms referring to identity and race. We should have a minimal requirement here, the land right against the blood right. Israel will have to deal with the prospect of universalism retaking the places where particularisms used to strive, if it has to deal with its own future.
Le Monde: Does this contribute to put into question the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state ?
Alain Badiou: You see, I have certainly written things against France which are more violent than things I have written against Israel! Zionism can be listed both in the colonialist and the revolutionary dimensions. It combines these two aspects and that what makes it a rare and singular phenomenon. That some people inside European communities who used to designate themselves as a particular minority with a national characteristic - the jewish minority - wanted a place to achieve their identity, in a territorial way, under the form of a state, is a historic reality that, like any other reality of the sort, is neither legitimate nor illegitimate. But I believe it unreasonable to consider this adventure as an exception, somehow different from other nationalistic adventures.
Comment:
What Badiou is stating is simple. 1) We cannot forget the Shoah but we must forget it in the political context of setting goals for peace in the Middle East. 2) The memory of the Shoah as the main content for the history of Jews should be questioned from the perspective of an objective history that looks at the non repetition of horrors because there is no possible objective categorical discrimination within an affective memory between indignation at horror and fascination for it. I must admit that this is a very strong point that was developped at lenght for the case of terrorism by Jean Baudraillard in 'L'esprit du terrorisme'. 3) "Jew" is not a name, it is a word. It does not designate a particular homogenous entity, it designates something more universal than the meaning given to it by zionists. It designates a multiplicity. Unless, of course, the word is tied to religion, transcendance, and divinity. Here Badiou challenges secular liberal zionist Jews while at the same time creating a contradiction in their use of the word as a name. Being a Jew is not a name, is not a fixed entity immobilised in the project of zionism, unless the word rallies the religion where it becomes, once again, universal, and not particular related to one experience of the world and one narrative, the zionist narrative. In discussing the use of the word, Badiou wants to refute the particularisms and the exceptionnalism which lie at the heart of the use of the word by zionists. 4) Finally, Badiou states clearly his preference for a one state solution. Refuting all the particularisms which are at the heart of the foundation of Israel, he takes the existence of Israel as a historical fact, neither legitimate nor illegitimate, and calls for a right of the land against the right of the blood if we are to dismiss the non ethical particularisms of the state of Israel as it is now. These particularisms are unethical because they do not have a correspondance in the philosophical equation for Truth, which is always universal.
Badiou is stating the obvious, and Israel must confront the obvious if it has to build a future for its citizens, unless international Zionism (Neoconism) continues to reshape reality to the extent every one of us will forget in the future what Truth and Facts mean.
Disclaimer: This post appeared also at Les Politiques in a slightly different form. It can be linked to but it cannot be copied entirely from neither blogs, Sabbah's and Les Politiques, without the authorisation of its author.
Contextually Related posts:
Jew†is not a name, it is a word. It does not designate a particular homogenous entity, it designates something more universal than the meaning given to it by zionists.
I think you missed the philosopher’s point. When we name something we attach a specific list of characteristics inherent to it, . When we invent a word for something we acknowledge its existence as a distinctly identifiable characteristic but other details are not attached to it. This is related to the Kantian idea of knowing things in and of themselves…
For example, if I say, “There is John Q. Amazon!” the people around me know I’m looking at a specific person, six feet tall, brown, with a lisp and excellent at football. However, if say, “There is a man!” it could be John Q. Amazon, but it could also be any other male.
What Badiou is rejecting is the idea that by labelling someone a “jew” – or by someone calling himself a “jew” – you can automatically attach the characteristics you want to that person. The person exists in and of himself and you can’t necessarily prejudge him.
Badiou would thus object to anyone thinking that a person who self-identifies himself as an Arab is a liar or that anyone calling himself a Jew was a descendant of apes and pigs unless these were considered specific dictionary definitions of the words “Arab” and “Jew”. So if you said, “anyone who is a thief is a Jew” you are stating a dictionary definition, not stating that Jews must be thieves. Somebody could still think of themselves as an “Arab” but be considered a “Jew” by your definition.
Am I being clear?
how about the word “Arab”, or better, the word “Palestinian”? Shouldn’t they be dismantled as well? Oh, and the word “Muslim”.
Strangely, Le Monde asks no such questions.
Solomon,
I think you missed the point. Badiou is making the ditinction between a name and a word in reference to what is particular and what is universal. A name deignates a particular entity and a word designates somthing universal.
Leave it to a philosopher to really screw things up.
Why don’t people accept that there is an Israeli state and there should be a Palestinian state.
Remove the Israelis from the Palestinian state that should excist.
He said a lot of words that were wasted.
I believe in the KISS method.
Keep It Simple Stupid!
All this talk only confuses the facts.
Israel here! Palestein there! (Gaza and the West Bank.)
All that is being accomplished is the killing of Palestinians in the name of Israel.
Politics on both sides are killing Palestinians.
I guess that Bush is happy.
If it makes Bush happy. I am upset.
Kimmy,
“Leave it to a philosopher to really screw things up.” I don’t think so. Badiou has made very useful distinctions which can help disentangle a zionist narrative now so deeply rooted in western consciousness.
Sophia: I’ll have to study this more closely.
very intersting article, indeed! Thanks for what u do, the world need to know!
Thanks Bastien.